This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

(September 2008) This study by RAND offers a new way of thinking about the challenge of expanding arts participation by focusing more on the critical role of arts learning in cultivating demand for the arts.

(July 2008) This “Story from the Field” explores how Dallas’s Thriving Minds initiative is expanding and improving arts learning opportunities both inside and outside of school for that city’s children.

(June 2008) In a number of urban areas in recent years, arts learning advocates have sought to counter a generation-long decline in public school arts education by forming coordinated networks of schools, cultural organizations, funders, local government and other groups to work in common to revive arts learning.

(February 2005) Public policy should be informed by a broader view of the benefits of the arts, and a stronger focus on introducing more Americans to engaging arts experiences beginning at an early age.

by Laura Vanderkam | City Journal | Spring 2008 vol. 19, no. 2

May 31 - The statistics say that 17-year-old Rocio Sazo should have dropped out of school by now. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), outside studies show that fewer than half of ninth-graders graduate from high school within four years. Only 16 percent of Hispanics like Sazo, who constitute the majority of students in this vast and sprawling district, graduate having passed the classes needed to apply to one of California’s public universities. But Sazo is defying those odds, too. She earns top grades, teachers rave about her leadership skills, she says she might become a math teacher, and she has applied to seven colleges. Now, she proudly relates, she is “waiting for acceptances”—acceptances, not decisions.

Sazo credits a big part of her success to her magnet school. Magnet schools are public schools that draw their students from outside traditional neighborhood zoning boundaries, usually requiring them to apply to get in. The schools also have specialized curricula or themes—math or science, say—and often operate within larger schools. Sazo’s magnet at Reseda High School has an unusual theme—law enforcement—and a surprising sponsor: the Los Angeles Police Department.

L.A.’s six police magnets—five high schools and a middle school—have only partly fulfilled their original mission of recruiting and training more homegrown minority cops. But with four-year graduation rates that nearly double the LAUSD average, these innovative schools have done something far more important: preparing at-risk minority kids for college and sending the majority of them there. As the national school-reform movement contemplates how to spend the $100 billion in new education funding authorized by the Obama stimulus bill, the LAPD schools deserve a close look. Why do they work? And can we replicate the model?

The police magnets require four years of phys-ed classes far more demanding than those in the public schools.

Courtesy of Reseda High School, Police Academy Magnet

The idea for “LAPD High” can trace its origins to the 1991 Rodney King arrest and subsequent 1992 riots, which left 53 people dead and over $1 billion in property destroyed. Following the violence, the LAPD began a major push to diversify its ranks, seeking to burnish its image among the city’s minorities. The proportion of minority officers rose from 37 percent in 1990 to about 46 percent in 1996. But the force was still “having a heck of a time recruiting homegrown cops,” remembers Roberta Weintraub, a member of the LAUSD school board at the time. LAPD recruiters were traveling “not only all over the U.S. but all over the world to find officers”; many of the new cops were good, but some struggled to grasp the city’s local dynamics.

So Weintraub approached then-mayor Richard Riordan with an idea: magnet high schools, affiliated with the LAPD, where active-duty officers would mentor and help instruct students and where the curricula would reflect criminal-justice themes. The hope was that some of the kids enrolled in these schools would later pursue careers in law enforcement in Los Angeles. With the help of outside grants, the first police magnets opened in 1996; by 2001, programs were running in Dorsey, Monroe, San Pedro, Reseda, and Wilson High Schools and at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa. Today, the program enrolls about 1,300 students, most of them Hispanic.

LAPD chief William Bratton had pondered a similar program to boost local minority recruitment as New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s first police commissioner back in the mid-nineties, but he left before he could get anything under way. When he took the top cop job in L.A. in 2002, he enthusiastically embraced the magnet program. “It was a dream I had in New York,” he says. “I came out here and found the dream was being actualized.”

The magnets differ starkly from typical urban schools. True, most faculty members are regular LAUSD teachers, and they offer the usual history, geometry, and composition instruction; students must take the classes required for admission to California’s public universities, including four years of English, three years of math, and two years of lab-science classes. Each school, though, has one or two active-duty LAPD officers on site, mentoring students and assisting teachers in some classes. The officers talk to students about what a police career entails, share stories, and even pinch-hit to keep the schools running smoothly (by, say, driving students home after sports practices). LAPD brass, including Bratton, make frequent visits to do student-uniform inspections and give motivational speeches.

The curriculum reflects the law-enforcement theme. Science classes, for example, detour from the usual quizzes and worksheets to emphasize high-tech police work. At Reseda, young CSI fans enjoy the use of a forensics lab. Under the tutelage of forensics teacher Barbara Andrade, students attack different types of glass with hammers to see how they shatter, and they study soil, just as detectives do to figure out if the clumps on a dead body are from the location where the body turned up or from somewhere else. The kids analyze fingerprints under a microscope and hair samples, too—when I visited, Alise Cayen, the Reseda magnet’s coordinator, had recently let students cut off a chunk of her hair to use in class.

Perhaps the schools’ most noticeable curricular feature is a relentless emphasis on physical fitness. Though modern police work requires more brains than brawn, physical stamina helps, and the cadets accordingly take four years of physical training that is a far cry from the halfhearted lap-running that many schools call gym class. At Reseda, the kids’ mile times—mostly seven to eight minutes, some as short as five and change—reflect the drills that coach Fernando Fernandez, a sub-three-hour marathoner, puts them through. The cadets lift weights, dart through obstacle courses, and crank out vast numbers of push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups. They graduate in the kind of shape that puts the rest of California schools—in which 35.4 percent of Hispanic children are overweight—to shame.

Discipline is strict, a communal priority. Reseda organizes cadets into squads of five to eight, each supervised by a student leader. The leaders make sure that their cadets get their work done, keep their grades up, behave in class, and dress neatly. If a cadet falls continually out of line, his squad leader can wind up demoted by a more advanced student leader or—at Reseda—by Sazo, who is the school’s captain (top-ranking cadet). She takes her enforcement duties seriously. “I set them aside and tell them, ‘You haven’t been doing your job, but if you get it together, you have the opportunity to get it back,’” she says. Peer pressure is powerful; the schools have figured out a way to use it for good.

Cadets must also clock dozens of hours of community service per year, and many log more (one student graduated with 1,800). Students often do their service in police stations, naturally. Cadet Edwin Flores volunteers at both his local Watts station and one in Beverly Hills—learning exactly what police officers do and what skills he’ll need to become one.

So far, the police magnets’ original purpose of getting more homegrown minority cops on the force is, at best, a work in progress. Part of the problem is that African-American students have been less enthusiastic about the program than have Hispanics. In 2006–07, 70 to 95 percent of cadets were Hispanic, depending on the school. But according to LAUSD records, all five high schools enrolled only about 50 African-American students. Even though Los Angeles is only 11 percent black, that’s still disappointing.

Timing is also a challenge. Students graduate from high school at 17 or 18 but can’t join the LAPD until they’re 21, preferably after getting a two- or four-year college degree. A lot can happen in the intervening years, including other jobs. And for urban young people, college completion rates are as abysmal as the LAUSD’s graduation statistics; in California, only a third of associate’s degree students finish in three years, and about a third of bachelor’s degree candidates still haven’t finished after six.

Nevertheless, a few early magnet graduates are joining the force. Cesar Corrales grew up in L.A.’s Koreatown neighborhood. “Initially, I never thought of becoming a police officer,” he says. But he had thought about becoming a lawyer, and he learned about Reseda’s police academy magnet from his older siblings, who were bused to Reseda High School. He graduated from the magnet in 2003 and, after a stint at a junior college, transferred to California State University, Los Angeles. The whole time, he worked as a police aide, logging time with the detective division, working as a Spanish translator, and helping set up the city’s sex-offender registry, among other things. “They always worked with my school schedule,” he says. His officer colleagues helped convince him that police work wasn’t as dangerous as his mother feared and that he could be promoted as early as five years after joining. In other cities, he says, “you have to wait until somebody dies or retires.” So after graduating from California State in December with a degree in political science, Corrales completed the initial physical test and the LAPD’s background questionnaire. When we spoke, he had a polygraph test scheduled. After that would come an oral interview and then, with luck, an academy start date.

But the police academy magnets are unequivocally succeeding at a more crucial educational goal: keeping kids in school. Cayen reports that of the 50 to 60 students enrolled on day one of freshman year, only five to eight will leave by sophomore year, with one to three leaving over each of the next two years—a graduation rate of 70 to 90 percent. Most of the leaving students, moreover, transfer to other schools rather than drop out of school entirely. A more impressive statistic still: of Reseda’s 2008 graduating class, 100 percent enrolled in a two- or four-year college or joined the military by fall. The magnets aren’t an educational utopia—test scores remain mediocre—but as Bratton tells me, “Here’s something you can almost fail-safe predict to a parent: if you put your kid into this program, he’ll get a high school education, be capable of going on to college, and have the potential of getting a meaningful job in the police department. Why would you not be interested in something like that?”

How are the LAPD magnets doing it? And is “it” replicable? More than half a decade after the federal No Child Left Behind law started designating schools as making adequate yearly progress or failing, the question of what makes a school effective continues to bedevil educators and the public. With billions in new federal education spending coming—some of it designated for rewarding better performance—the question has become even more urgent.

Some of the LAPD schools’ success is clearly due to selection. The magnets have minimum admissions requirements. Reseda kids, for instance, must have earned at least a 2.0 grade-point average in middle school and not have major discipline incidents on their records.

Further, because students choose to attend the magnets, the program inevitably draws a more motivated group of young people than neighborhood schools that must take all comers. “Kids have to want to be here,” says Cayen. Indeed, sometimes they go to astonishing lengths to be there. Brianda Aguilar, a Reseda junior who might like to be an LAPD fitness trainer, boards the bus every weekday at 6:30 am and spends an hour getting to school; after activities, she often doesn’t get home until 8 pm. But she’d rather have the long commute than attend the school near her San Fernando Valley neighborhood, where her mom works as a special-education aide. She attended summer school there before her freshman year and found her classmates’ conversations disturbing. “All they were talking about was how much weed they had,” she says.

But the magnets’ students don’t come from privileged backgrounds. Most qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, hard-luck stories are common, and a fleet of buses carts many of them in from rougher parts of town. Take Flores, who lives in Watts, where other teens sometimes warn him that he’s “in the wrong neighborhood” when he wears his school uniform (which resembles police blues). Or the young woman who managed to earn straight As and gain admission to UC Berkeley—but said that the best thing that had ever happened to her was her father’s death. The man had been an abusive alcoholic who tormented her mother and four sisters. The family survived on her mother’s piecework income from sewing jackets in the garment district. When the student graduated with many honors, her mother decided that she couldn’t spare the three hours of income to attend graduation.

These sad stories would be a perfect excuse for failure. But the fact that the police academy magnets don’t use them as an excuse—and still manage to post impressive graduation statistics—means that their educational approach likely has a lot to do with their success. Consider the demanding physical training, which gives students—many burdened with chaotic, unstructured home lives—a daily lesson in setting goals and working to achieve them.

Lowering your mile time by 30 seconds isn’t easy. When you run enough laps and lift enough weights to pull it off, you learn that effort pays—and perhaps that other hard things are possible as well. Daniela Gurrola, who graduated from Reseda in 2003, certainly learned that lesson. She won the girls’ Toughest Cadet Alive designation as a student (clocking a sub-six-minute mile). Currently a student at Mission Community College, she hopes to transfer to Cal State in the fall. Meanwhile, she’s working full-time as a 311 dispatcher for the city, directing community residents to whichever office can solve their problems. It’s a tough schedule, going to school in the morning and working from 3 to 11:30 pm most nights. But the lessons she learned at the police academy magnet have helped her deal with it all. “They teach you a lot of determination in yourself,” she says. “Basically, you can do anything as long as you stick to it.”

It’s also worth noting that urban schools where at-risk students learn about the adult world (for instance, what’s involved in a law-enforcement career) can often keep graduation and college enrollment rates high. To take one example, the Cristo Ray Network of urban Catholic schools, which asks students to work one or two days per week at jobs in local businesses to earn their tuition, has a near-100-percent graduation rate. Add to this future-oriented approach the motivated teachers whom the Los Angeles police academy magnets attract, and their success starts to make sense.

Encouragingly, the Obama administration’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, may be open to at least some of the lessons of these surprising schools. He served as director of the Ariel Education Initiative, whose flagship, Ariel Community Academy in Chicago, is a magnet school serving poor minority children. It embraces educational ideals similar to those of the LAPD schools: a school-uniform policy, high standards, and a focus on thematic education (in Ariel’s case, financial, investment, and entrepreneurial instruction).

Of course, not everyone wants a police-influenced education or a career in law enforcement. But there are many worse ways to spend education dollars than on institutions like “LAPD High.” As Bratton says, “What’s the worst-case scenario? We’ve produced a productive citizen who is of the city, lives in the city, who will have good thoughts about us.”

Laura Vanderkam, a New York City–based writer, is the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues.

“Rarely has architecture seemed so visually dramatic -- or so politically out of touch.”

LAUSD's bold new campus for Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 flaunts a district's-worth of design at one site. Given the architect and client, conflict, rethinking and missteps were inevitable.

By Christopher Hawthorne| LA Times Architecture Critic

URBAN(E) CAMPUS: The complex alongside the 101 Freeway in downtown L.A. cost $232 million; a 2003 estimate had it at $87 million.

Al Seib, Los Angeles Times

May 31, 2009 - At the new arts high school downtown, it has become nearly impossible to separate the substance of the architecture, by Wolf D. Prix and the Austrian firm Coop Himmelblau, from debates over cost overruns or questions about who will attend the campus when it opens in September.

But maybe that's the wrong goal. The story of the arts academy -- still officially known by its stiff place holder of a name, Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 -- is hardly one about how bold, unconventional architecture trumps all other forces, or even exists comfortably outside them. The design of the campus, in fact, has complicated its political fate even as the reverse has been true, leaving it vulnerable to the overheated but potent charge that it is an elitist enclave standing aloof from its neighborhood.

Once the debates over cost and curriculum have fallen away -- and that may take years -- posterity is likely to look kindly on the campus, which has given Grand Avenue a powerfully unorthodox new landmark and added a mysterious and unconventional silhouette to the downtown skyline. Yet the speed with which the campus became a symbol of controversy and discord raises serious questions about whether Coop Himmelblau, known for bravura design gestures and terrifically complex form-making, was the right choice for this contentious obstacle course of a commission.

Rarely has the firm's architecture seemed so visually dramatic -- or so politically out of touch.

In its finished form, the school emerges as a symbol not so much of a rudderless school district as one where the person at the helm is continually changing -- and the direction of the ship can swing markedly from year to year. Key decisions about the shape and mission of the school have been made by a long and diverse list of architects and administrators, each one with a different vision of what the campus might be.

First came architecture firm AC Martin and Partners, hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2001 to prepare a preliminary design for a traditional large high school on the sight of the district's old headquaters. Next was billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, who stepped in later the same year to propose the switch to an arts academy. Agreeing to pay for some of the school's operations -- though not necessarily for increased construction costs -- he helped arrange a design competition whose jury selected Coop Himmelblau in September 2002.

The firm emerged from a blue-chip shortlist that also included New York's Bernard Tschumi Architects, London's Foreign Office Architects and a pair of local firms: Daly Genik Architects and Michael Maltzan Architecture. After Himmelblau produced a new design, the school's fortunes fell into the hands of a string of LAUSD superintendents: first Roy Romer, then David Brewer and now Ramon C. Cortines. Richard Alonzo, superintendent for Local District 4, in which the school is located, has also helped shape its fortunes, strongly opposing the idea of drawing students through competitive, districtwide applications.

Romer, Brewer, Cortines and Alonzo all struggled to quell anger, in the public and in the media, at the news that the school's construction cost was quickly ballooning. The total eventually reached $232 million -- a vast jump, even in an era of accelerating construction costs, from a 2003 estimate of $87 million.

Last month, Cortines announced that he wouldn't allow the school to operate as a charter, an option Broad and others had pushed for as the district struggled to find a principal for the school and put a curriculum in place for September. Instead, the LAUSD will oversee the campus and will reserve 1,200 of its 1,700 slots for students in the immediate area, even though the construction of other schools has eased overcrowding in the neighborhood.

Different lesson plans

Compared to most of the campuses commissioned by the LAUSD during its massive building campaign of recent years, of course, the high school is a strikingly ambitious and inventive piece of architecture. Covering a spacious 10-acre site across the Hollywood Freeway from Rafael Moneo's 2002 Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, it combines sharp-edged architectural forms with idiosyncratic interiors and generous, enveloping outdoor spaces.

The campus consists of four large, boxy buildings on the perimeter of its site holding classrooms and studios for art, music and dance. These are remnants of the AC Martin design, as is a football field toward the southern end of the campus big enough for a community college.

Three slicing, curvilinear elements studded with references to the designs of Le Corbusier -- a stunning cone-shaped library, a soaring lobby opening onto Grand and a controversial 140-foot tower rising from the fly space above a 950-seat theater -- throw off the predictability and conservatism of the basic layout to memorable effect.

So do oversized porthole windows on the classroom buildings, which give the interior spaces a surprisingly rich range of personalities. The whole ensemble of buildings then encloses a series of courtyards and prominent outdoor stairs, including a dramatically wide staircase leading up from the main student entrance on Cesar Chavez Avenue.

The LAUSD insisted rather late in the design process on an imposing security gate across the foot of that staircase, sinking Prix's hopes that it might operate as a broad front stoop for the neighborhood as well as the school. That footnote is among many signs of the shakiness of the architect's hold on the political situation he was operating in here.

The story of the district's building campaign is in one sense the story of architects seeing their attempts to produce open, welcoming campuses marred by security fencing hurriedly put up to satisfy demands by parents and the district for more protection. Prix's decision to make the broad staircase an anchor of his design was in a certain sense to set up a battle with the district he was destined to lose -- and to play into the hands of opponents of a districtwide arts academy at the same time.

The striking but seemingly inaccessible staircase, after all, perfectly lays out the equation relied on by the school's most strident critics: Extravagance plus exclusion equals elitism.

Inside the campus, the combination of the material choices -- polished metal panels and huge swaths of concrete, in particular -- and the size of the open spaces means that on hot days shade will be a prized commodity, particularly on the upper plaza near the field. That problem should ease a bit as the landscaping grows in, though the courtyards may eternally seem better suited for the weaklight of Central Europe than our more intense sunshine.

Prix, who founded Coop Himmelblau with Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer in 1968, understands and deeply appreciates Los Angeles. Over the years, he has studied, taught and kept an office here. And he extends the long and productive relationship between Viennese and Angeleno architects, one that goes back as far as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra and also includes shopping-mall guru Victor Gruen, an early mentor of Frank Gehry.

But Prix is hardly cut from the same cloth as those architects, whose work is marked by a frankness and economy well suited to building in Southern California. As I wrote after visiting Coop Himmelblau's addition to the Akron Art Museum two years ago, there are few contemporary architects who require so much steel -- and therefore so much money -- to prop up each one of their ideas.

Prix's style is what you might call mesmerizingly inefficient. Like a baroque architect piling ornament into the upper reaches of a church interior, he tends to make his most highly wrought spaces inaccessible and essentially decorative -- in the soaring ceiling above the school's main public lobby on Grand Avenue, for example, or in the spectacular but defiantly over-scaled atrium in Akron.

These architectural set pieces are often stunning. And it would be beyond unfair to blame the architects for every cost overrun. But Coop Himmelblau's track record also means that few of the budget problems and complaints that have plagued the school should come as a complete surprise, especially since Prix has rarely worked for clients as risk-averse and cash-strapped as the LAUSD.

Quite an education

No element of the school has been more controversial than the tower rising on the western edge of the site. It is an architectural and urban gesture with a power bordering on the uncanny. It joins the bell tower on the cathedral across the freeway to form a gateway to downtown Los Angeles and evokes, in twisting, abstract form, the number 9 in the school's name. But it has also become a punching bag for opponents of the school's cost and mission, particularly since it wound up serving no functional purpose.

The tower was originally designed to hold a special-events room at the top that could be rented out for private gatherings. With its dramatic perch atop the downtown skyline, it likely would have been booked from the start. But according to the architects, the LAUSD decided -- in a classic example of penny-wise, pound-foolish value engineering -- that it couldn't justify spending the extra money to make the room usable.

With its AC Martin skeleton, its shimmering Himmelblau flesh and its stunning, empty tower, then, the high school is hardly just an example of innovative but expensive name-brand architecture. It is a project haunted by second thoughts and 180-degree turns, a case of conservatism replaced by somewhat misguided daring and finally undercut by several failures of nerve. And nearly every twist in that story line can be read in the architecture itself.

The truth is that there is a long list of architects doing work as inventive as Coop Himmelblau's whose styles and temperaments might have made them far better choices to design a public high school for the arts for the LAUSD.

By assembling a team of the most talented emerging and established architects, landscape architects, visual artists and graphic designers in Southern California, for instance, the district might have turned every corner of the high school into a canvas for innovative creative work.

The idea of picking an architect based on region or generation has its limits. It is certainly no cure-all. But in this case it might have helped connect the school to the most fertile parts of L.A. culture, drawing connections across a city where young designers and artists are producing some of the most groundbreaking work in the world. The district might have paired, just to pick a few names, architecture by Maltzan, Daly Genik, Johnston Marklee, Touraine Richmond or Barbara Bestor with graphic design, way-finding, artwork and murals by Mark Bradford, Ruben Ochoa, Geoff McFetridge, Walead Beshty or Anna Sew Hoy.

That approach might have made the idea of a districtwide arts academy not just palatable but actually attractive to the public. It would have sacrificed architectural fireworks in an effort to safeguard the school's mission through the construction process. It would have promoted the idea of multidiscplinary collaboration, in constrast to the aggressive virtuosity of Prix, which usually leaves little room for complementary statements by artists and designers.

It also might have helped trim the school's ultimate cost, distinguishing it as an example of combining innovative ideas with pragmatism about budgets and materials. This, indeed, is the thread that ties together every period of great Los Angeles architecture, stitching a line from apartments by Schindler and Irving Gill to Case Study and ranch houses and through to early work by Gehry and Thom Mayne, among many others. As Gehry put it more than two decades ago, the goal of such architecture is "making something inexpensive and getting more out of it," not less.

Extending that remarkable history should have been the guiding philosophy for the LAUSD's construction effort. Instead, the district has been churning out schools with a martial discipline while largely overlooking the role that good design can play in shaping the attitudes and consciousness of students.

For the most part, the district treated architecture not as a means of helping carve out humane classroom spaces under severe budget pressure but instead as a kind of extra or frill.

That led directly to the process that created the arts high school. Having failed to infuse most of its new campuses with innovative design of any sort, the LAUSD and its patrons moved to add capital-A architecture to the one on Grand Avenue. Cost overruns and other missteps then ratcheted up the price of the school to levels that have become politically embarrassing for district leadership.

But many of these conflicts and controversies were fated from the start -- or at least from the moment that the district, having skimped on serious architecture in its other new schools, decided in this case to gorge on it.

California State PTA President Pam Brady called on state leaders to redouble their efforts to steer California through its current economic crisis, following the defeat yesterday of five measures on the May 19 special election ballot.

"The defeat of these measures doesn't change our need to find budget and funding solutions for California; it only adds new urgency to our task," said Brady, on behalf of California State PTA's nearly 1 million volunteer members.

"We also must dispel this notion once and for all that cutting vital programs is the only way to close the state's deficit. Polls consistently show the public does not want cuts to schools. We need a thoughtful, balanced approach both for the short and long-term."

"An entire generation of California children is threatened unless we change way decisions are being made in Sacramento right now."

LAUSD CUTTING BACK ON SUMMER SCHOOL: Like the song says... school's out for summer.Friday, May 29, 2009 11:49 AM City News Service Thursday, 28 May 2009, 10:56 PM PDT - Los Angeles - Summer school has been canceled this year for Los Angeles Unified School District elementary and middle schools due to declining revenues and the current state budget deficit, officials announced on Thursday. The move is expected to affect more than 225,000 students and save about $34 million, according to the district.

HEALTHY SCHOOL LUNCH EFFORTS FACE DAUNTING HURDLES: The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995. Friday, May 29, 2009 11:27 AM By Lisa Baertlein, Reuters from the Montreal (Canada) Gazette Photograph by: Jana Birchum, Getty Images LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - School cafeteria meals like low-fat pizzas with whole grain crust don't taste too bad to Paola Villatoro, a 17-year-old at Downtown Magnet High School in Los Angeles. "Some of it is pretty good," she said. But West Adams Preparatory School student Alfredo Segura

AN UNFINISHED CANVAS • Arts Education in California: taking stock of policies and practicesTuesday, May 26, 2009 1:41 PM sri International + THE WILLIAM AND FLORA HEWLETT FOUNDATION | March 2009 California policymakers have established ambitious goals for arts education, calling on schools to provide a standards-based, sequential course of study in dance, music, theater, and visual arts. Yet An Unfinished Canvas, a report by SRI International, revealed that an overwhelming majority of California schools fail to

DESIGNING THE ARTS LEARNING COMMUNITY: A Handbook for K-12 Professional Development PlannersTuesday, May 26, 2009 12:27 PM A Project of: Los Angeles County Arts Commission | San Francisco Arts Commission and Santa Clara County Office of Education Synthesizing extensive research of arts education practice across the United States, this handbook is a guide to designing arts education professional development for K-12 classroom teachers and provides a searchable database of 50 arts learning communities.

NYC TEACHER AGAINST MAYORAL CONTROL: All that power hasn't made things betterTuesday, May 26, 2009 8:44 AM By Arthur Goldstein | SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, May 24th 2009, 4:00 AM -- As a teacher in an A-rated school, I believe mayoral control has been an absolute disaster. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our federal and state governments have checks and balances so no one person has total control, which is a synonym for dictatorship. City kids need reasonable class sizes and

HUNDREDS OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS PROTEST TEACHER CUTS + STORM BREWING AT SANTEESunday, May 24, 2009 6:30 PM Hundreds of high school students protest teacher cuts: About 2,250 teachers are expected to lose jobs as L.A. Unified tries to balance its budget. By Howard Blume From the Los Angeles Times May 23, 2009 -- Hundreds of Los Angeles high school students stayed out of class on Friday to protest looming teacher layoffs. At one school, they also threatened to boycott important state testing that

FROM Lexus Cars Press Release

4/9/2009 - Lexus and Alicia Keys honor Los Angeles' Thomas Jefferson High School through 'Lexus Keys to Innovation'; awards TJHS a $10,000 Grand Prize to foster its environmental programs for future students and the community.

Lexus and multi Grammy award-winning recording artist Alicia Keys, announced today that Los Angeles’ Thomas Jefferson High School, will be honored with a $10,000 Grand Prize for its environmental achievements through the “Lexus Keys to Innovation” philanthropy program. The “Lexus Keys to Innovation” program is a unique way for Lexus and Alicia Keys to recognize and reward students who have successfully implemented innovative environmental programs in their schools and communities.

Through “Lexus Keys to Innovation,” Lexus and Alicia Keys presented ten schools across the country with a $2,000 donation to support existing environmental programs. In addition to the donation, Lexus and Alicia Keys provided the students complimentary concert tickets and an exclusive opportunity for students to meet Alicia in person during her sound check. Following the tour, each of the participating schools submitted a detailed “action plan” for a chance to win $10,000 to support their existing environmental programs.

Thomas Jefferson High School’s “action plan” proposed that the $10,000 Grand Prize be used to create a native “green” space on campus for the students and faculty to utilize as an interactive educational tool. In a South Central Los Angeles neighborhood currently dominated by concrete, meat packing plants and factories, this new space will be a welcome addition.

“The students of Thomas Jefferson High School have shown a lot of passion toward improving the environment,” said Dave Nordstrom, Lexus vice president of marketing. “We’re very pleased to play a part in helping that passion carry over to future students and the community.”

Green Space Project Thomas Jefferson High School Los Angeles, CA

Action Plan: Thomas Jefferson High School proposes that the $10,000 grant be used to create a native plant green space on the school’s campus. The mission of the program is to better this South LA high school and community by bringing a much needed green space to the area which is currently dominated by concrete, meat packing plants and factories. The benefits of the Green Space is projected to improve the status of this South Central high school by creating outdoor spaces and gardens to offer an increasingly calm place for students and faculty to congregate. Additionally, the space will help to improve the air quality around the campus, and will allow students at Thomas Jefferson High School and nearby Harmony Elementary School to use the Green Space as an outdoor science lab.

Both Lexus and Alicia Keys have taken an active role in a variety of environmentally driven initiatives that have had a positive global impact. With “Lexus Keys to Innovation,” Lexus and Alicia Keys have created yet another opportunity to reinforce their shared commitment to safeguarding our planet.

“I want to congratulate the dedicated students of Thomas Jefferson High,” said Alicia Keys. “Lexus is an elegant and inspiring brand and through our partnership we’re creating programs like ‘Lexus Keys to Innovation’ to support environmental initiatives in high schools across the country through music and education.”

Saturday, May 30, 2009

CA PTA Press Release

May 20, 2009 - SACRAMENTO - California State PTA President Pam Brady called on state leaders to redouble their efforts to steer California through its current economic crisis, following the defeat yesterday of five measures on the May 19 special election ballot.

"The defeat of these measures doesn't change our need to find budget and funding solutions for California; it only adds new urgency to our task," said Brady, on behalf of California State PTA's nearly 1 million volunteer members.

"Now is not the time to retreat," Brady said. "Our state faces an unprecedented fiscal crisis and bold, bipartisan decisions are needed. Now - more than ever - we need to ensure that children are the top priority. We can't keep making cuts to schools - including more than $1 billion proposed in additional cuts during the last month of this current school year alone. Today's students are tomorrow's workforce, and our state's economic health in the future depends on what happens in classrooms now."

Brady said the state must adopt long-term budget reforms, including reducing the voting margin in the Legislature to 55 percent or a simple majority for passage of both the California state budget and revenue measures. California is one of only three states that requires a two-thirds vote.

"We also must dispel this notion once and for all that cutting vital programs is the only way to close the state's deficit. Polls consistently show the public does not want cuts to schools. We need a thoughtful, balanced approach both for the short and long-term."

Brady said PTAs will continue to play an essential role in helping local communities and schools navigate through these challenging economic times.

"PTAs help bring people together to make a positive difference for all children and families," Brady said. "In these times, we'll need to seize on new and creative ways to work together. And parents need to stay well-informed and active so they can assist local and state policymakers in identifying and advocating for steps that will lead toward adequate funding for education.

"An entire generation of California children is threatened unless we change way decisions are being made in Sacramento right now."

Friday, May 29, 2009

City News Service

Thursday, 28 May 2009, 10:56 PM PDT - Los Angeles - Summer school has been canceled this year for Los Angeles Unified School District elementary and middle schools due to declining revenues and the current state budget deficit, officials announced on Thursday.

The move is expected to affect more than 225,000 students and save about $34 million, according to the district.

"This is a sad day for our students, our parents and families and our school district," said LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines. "In all of my years in education, I have never seen budget news as bad as the number currently faced by this school district.

"As a result, I have made a difficult decision and I have announced the cancellation of this year's summer school and intersession for elementary and middle school students."

At the high school level, the district will offer summer school and intersession at the high school level for "credit recovery," meaning graduation requirements, core classes and A-G classes only. The Extended School Year Program for students with disabilities will also be offered.

However, the number of schools providing summer programs is being reduced.

By Caroline Grannan – Examiner.com

May 28, 7:46 PM · My 91-year-old mother-in-law energetically saves up clippings from the L.A. Times to send us in fat envelopes every few weeks. While my kids joke (lovingly) that she sends them every article that mentions music in any way, she’s right on target with my interests. So today a 2½-week-old clipping arrived about Green Dot’s Locke High School in Watts.

Locke, which I covered a couple of weeks ago in following up on a New Yorker article about it, is a rare experiment in the education reform world – a newly charterized school that’s truly supposed to accept all neighborhood students rather than only the kids from motivated families who seek it out and apply. Locke was a badly struggling LAUSD high school that was turned over to the charter operator Green Dot Schools (which, it’s crucial to note, has vastly more money to pour into the school than the bare-bones school district does, thanks to private benefactors).

The Times is running a continuing series on Locke – unsigned articles on its editorial page. It’s probably just as well for whoever’s writing them that the coverage is unsigned -- especially since all of their jobs are teetering on the brink – given that one week’s sunny outlook has to be contradicted by the next week’s dose of reality.

May 10, 2009

A YEAR AT LOCKE: These exams also put teachers to the test Benchmark exams not only improve student performance, they help make instructors accountable.

An excerpt:

You can discern a lot about the changes at Locke this year in just a casual visit. Since the former Los Angeles Unified school became a Green Dot charter, students sit in class instead of wandering the halls or smoking marijuana on the roof. Open any classroom door and you find an energetic teacher engaged in instruction instead of screening a movie to fill time. Basic improvements -- but transformational for this Watts school.

Only 18 days later, a different view emerges:

May 28, 2009

Where change begins at L.A.'s Locke High School: Two freshman academies show that improvements in student achievement won't be easy or quick.

A visit to its freshman academies, however, shows that major gains don't come easy, or fast. So far, not a single student at Locke 1 has tested as proficient on the school's benchmark exams in algebra. Locke 2 is in similar straits. Students disappeared during the school year; new students with their own difficulties signed up. These are the same intractable problems Locke suffered from as an L.A. Unified school.

And this time, light dawns: The Times writer gets the point that eludes so many mainstream journalists who swallow the charter school Kool-Aid:

Previous Green Dot charters, opened as alternatives to failing public schools, attracted motivated families that came from far-flung communities to place their children on waiting lists. As a result, enrollment was predictable and stable. At Locke, Green Dot took over an already cramped and rundown campus and committed to accepting students within its enrollment area -- which has meant taking more than it has room for, and enrolling students who are less interested in what Green Dot has to offer. …

Locke can't be run by the standards of most other schools, or even other Green Dot schools. The charter operator normally requires a certain amount of parent involvement. Here, parents are often overwhelmed and sometimes uninterested. Some come in for conferences clearly under the influence of drugs; other parents are in prison.

After a promising start to the school year, dozens of new students enrolled. Some had just been released from juvenile detention, bearing gang tattoos on their necks -- at age 14. Staff found marijuana stuffed into the caps of pens. Graffiti made an appearance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love it if a magical solution did turn up. I do not love it when a “reform” is hailed as a magical solution when it isn’t; when factors like creaming for highly motivated students are ignored, downplayed or denied. There’s also the not-so-small factor than Green Dot has tons of private money to pour into these projects, which explains how it can afford enough security guards to keep the campus orderly (with a few glitches like those annoying incidents of pepper-spraying students).

My mother-in-law asked, “How are the Green Dot schools in S.F. doing?” Well, we don’t have any here (yet). I like to think our Board of Education members are smart enough to realize that now they can watch the Locke experiment to see how a charter operator does when it can’t cream. If it turns out to be a success, the welcome mat will be out.

But West Adams Preparatory School student Alfredo Segura doesn't like them. "It tastes like prison food," said Segura, 16, as he and other students ate snacks at a fast-food joint near the school.

Los Angeles Unified School District is an anti-junk-food pioneer, but the obstacles it faces show how difficult it is to change habits shaped by decades of unhealthy eating promoted by the mammoth fast-food industry.

The district's food services department has thrown out deep-fat fryolators, added more fresh foods and reduced sodium in cafeteria meals. It also has outlawed sugary sodas and banished junk food vending machines on campus.

But enforcement has been spotty and fast-food chains and convenience stores wait outside school gates, eager to provide students with a fix.

Even though she likes some of the school meals, Villatoro joins friends for weekly lunches at a fast-food outlet across from the school.

The number of U.S. fast-food restaurants exploded to about 220,000 in 2001 from 30,000 in 1970. And over the last three decades, spending on fast food hit $110 billion from $6 billion, according the public-health focused nonprofit Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

As working parents turned to restaurants for cheap super-sized meals, the eating habits of adults and children alike changed and waistbands expanded.

At the same time, schools dropped recess and physical education classes that used to burn off calories, to carve out more time for lessons.

Obesity rates for school-age children have tripled to 17 percent since 1980. At that rate, there is an "epidemic in the United States," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts worry about soaring rates of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions as these children grow up, further adding to the country's health crisis.

In Los Angeles County 23 percent of school children were obese and another 19 percent were overweight in 2007, the county's health department said.

OUTDATED NUTRITIONAL STANDARDS

The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995.

States have tried to act without waiting for the federal government. As of last August, 18 states had adopted tougher nutritional standards than the U.S. government -- but most lack enforcement power and cannot punish noncompliance, says the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit organization that works to raise community health standards.

Recent data suggests that childhood obesity rates may be leveling off. Some experts say programs like healthier school lunches are starting to work, but others are skeptical.

President Barack Obama wants to increase funding for U.S. child nutrition programs by $1 billion per year to prevent children from going hungry in a recession that has sent unemployment to a 25-year high.

"We're hoping it comes our way," said Laura Benavidez, deputy director of the Food Services Department for the Los Angeles school district with 690,000 students.

Its food services budget of $325 million this year covers not only meals, but also staff salaries, benefits, insurance utilities and utensils. It spends about 70 cents per meal, excluding milk, which costs 18 to 20 cents per serving. The district currently loses money on every lunch it serves.

At Castelar Elementary in Los Angeles' Chinatown section recently, students rushed a salad bar, scooping up orange slices and half bananas, green peas and salad -- a fair portion of which actually went into stomachs instead of trash cans.

Still, the healthy message is often undermined by school fund-raising events where selling junk food raises money for sports teams or academic clubs.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

sri International + THE WILLIAM AND FLORA HEWLETT FOUNDATION | March 2009

California policymakers have established ambitious goals for arts education, calling on schools to provide a standards-based, sequential course of study in dance, music, theater, and visual arts. Yet An Unfinished Canvas, a report by SRI International, revealed that an overwhelming majority of California schools fail to meet these guidelines and that key barriers include inadequate and unstable funding, insufficient instructional time, and limited teacher capacity.

New studies look more closely at these barriers, finding that to reach the goals we’ve set, we need to make significant changes in the overall level and stability of funding, increase the amount of available instructional time, and invest in building the district infrastructure and teacher capacity to deliver standards-based arts instruction.

The budget realities that drive policy discussions may make the arts seem like a luxury. However, California has very clear goals for arts education, and there is a tremendous gap between what’s happening in schools and what is called for by state policy.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

California’s schools are failing to meet state arts standards.

Almost nine out of 10 California schools (89 percent) fail to offer a standards-based course of study in all four arts disciplines: dance, music, theater, and visual arts.

More than one in four schools (29 percent) do not offer a • standards-based course of study in any of the arts disciplines.

Methods of delivering arts instruction vary by school level, often resulting in a limited experience at the elementary level, and limited participation at the secondary level.

Standards alignment, assessment, and accountability practices are uneven in arts education, and often not present at all.

Funding for education is insufficient and unstable, adversely affecting spending on the arts.

California lags behind the national average on per pupil funding for education and also appears to spend less per pupil on elementary arts education.

Without stable funding, it is impossible to develop and support a standards-based course of study in each of the four arts disciplines or make investments in arts education that require stable funding, such as hiring full-time arts specialists.

California elementary schools spend less time on the arts than other states.

Schools in other states dedicate sufficient time and resources to offer both music and visual arts instruction to 100 percent of students, beginning in kindergarten.

Other states may have more time for arts instruction because they have longer school days. California’s school week is two hours shorter than the national average.

Only 36 percent of California classroom teachers reported that a credentialed arts teacher provides music instruction to the students in their class. In the other arts disciplines, the percentages were much lower: visual arts (16 percent), dance (9 percent), and theatre (7 percent).

In the absence of credentialed arts teachers, the arts instruction in elementary classrooms is not likely to be aligned with the state’s standards. In fact, 65 percent of classroom teachers are not familiar with the VPA standards in any discipline.

Elementary classroom teachers are not well supported to teach the arts, with teachers in poor, lower-performing schools reporting lower levels of support from district leaders, principals, colleagues, and parents than their counterparts in more affluent, higher-performing schools.

California districts lack the infrastructure to support arts education programs.

California school districts do not have strategic arts plans, district arts committees, and arts coordinators to build towards implementation of state arts standards.

Higher-capacity districts are more likely to take a systemic approach to arts education.

WHERE WE NEED TO BE

Our schools need stable funding in order to make time for the arts, hire arts professionals and support the classroom teachers needed to help students meet state standards and achieve a comprehensive education.

Classroom teachers can deliver arts instruction if they receive adequate pre-service training, professional development, and support from arts teachers or other professionals.

Recommendation: District capacity and principal leadership is critical.

Districts need support, including professional development for district leaders, to establish the infrastructure — for example, long-term plans, accountability mechanisms — to plan and oversee arts education programs. With increased capacity, counties could be in a position to provide this support.

Principals need to be equipped to serve as leaders of instructional programs that include the arts.

Synthesizing extensive research of arts education practice across the United States, this handbook is a guide to designing arts education professional development for K-12 classroom teachers and provides a searchable database of 50 arts learning communities. Explore this interactive resource online or click hereto download the full handbook.

How to BeginStart by orienting yourself. What is an arts learning community? What are the Big Ideas guiding the field? Assess Your NeedTake a moment to reflect. Inquiry is at the heart of professional development. Where are you and your teachers now? Where do you want to take arts education in your schools?

By Arthur Goldstein | SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sunday, May 24th 2009, 4:00 AM -- As a teacher in an A-rated school, I believe mayoral control has been an absolute disaster.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our federal and state governments have checks and balances so no one person has total control, which is a synonym for dictatorship.

City kids need reasonable class sizes and decent facilities. Under Mayor Bloomberg, class sizes just took their biggest leap in 10 years.

Some people say class size doesn't matter, but even the best teachers can give more attention to 20 kids than 34. The fewer kids I have, the more individual attention each one gets.

Under this mayor, charter schools get the best of everything, including small classes and new technology.

My high school was built to hold 1,800 but enrolls 4,450 students. My kids sit in a crumbling trailer, with no technology and often no heat in the winter. So much for efficiency.

The mayor says it's his way or "the bad old days." That's a false choice. We need a system that works better than what we have.

We need a chancellor who works for the kids, not the mayor. The chancellor needs to fight for what's best for kids whether or not the mayor agrees. He can't do that if the mayor can fire him for not following his orders.

A few years ago, the mayor fired two members of the Panel for Educational Policy who had the nerve to disagree with him.

Consequently, the PEP is a mayoral rubber stamp. No mayoral appointee dares to stand up for kids.

This mayor boasts about accountability. Teachers are accountable. Principals are accountable, but the only time the mayor is accountable is once every four years.

That's not enough, particularly for a man who is prepared to spend $100 million to buy reelection and who scoffed at the voters by changing the term limits law they twice affirmed.

Four more years of this system guarantees the privatization and destruction of public education in New York City. That's a prospect we should all oppose.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Hundreds of high school students protest teacher cuts: About 2,250 teachers are expected to lose jobs as L.A. Unified tries to balance its budget.

By Howard Blume From the Los Angeles Times

May 23, 2009 -- Hundreds of Los Angeles high school students stayed out of class on Friday to protest looming teacher layoffs. At one school, they also threatened to boycott important state testing that starts next week.

The largest demonstration involved about 450 students from the Santee Education Complex, who marched three miles to the downtown headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, right, speaks with students who converged on the school district's downtown headquarters to protest looming teacher layoffs.

A few students were detained by police during the mostly peaceful protest at the Los Angeles Unified School District's downtown headquarters.

The students were demonstrating against pending layoffs intended to help ease a $596.1-million budget gap for the district next year. The projected shortfall grew as much as $400 million this week in the wake of further declines in state revenue and the defeat of ballot measures in the May 19 special election.

Smaller protests Friday involved students from Lincoln High in Lincoln Heights and from Manual Arts High and West Adams Preparatory High, southwest of downtown.

"This is only the beginning," said Korrine Robinson, an 18-year-old Santee senior. "What I'm hoping for is that the bigger people upstairs will take notice."

Supt. Ramon C. Cortines told students that so far he had no viable alternative to cuts that he also disliked. Separately, officials announced that about 400 fewer teachers would be laid off because of early retirements and spending decisions made by governing councils at school sites. That still leaves about 2,250 teachers who are expected to lose jobs.

To apply more pressure, Santee student organizers threatened to boycott state testing, which begins Tuesday for two-thirds of students at 33 secondary schools that operate on year-round calendars. These tests help determine a school's academic ranking.

Santee Principal Richard Chavez said any boycotting students could face the loss of privileges, including attending graduation ceremonies and next week's prom.

School police arrested two students during the protest: one for having smoking paraphernalia and another for possessing a lighter. They were held for processing in the smokers' patio outside district headquarters, which sent a number of adult smokers scurrying.

On Monday, during a rally at Santee, police ticketed three students for disorderly conduct.

Some student organizers on Friday wouldn't give their names, saying they feared retribution from administrators.

World history teacher Ron Gochez said he appreciated the students' support. "It's a very interesting sentiment on campus," Gochez said. "Teachers are almost depending on the students because it's the last opportunity to do something." More than 30 teachers at Santee could lose their jobs, he added.

Miguel Chay, a 10th grader who twisted his knee playing in a soccer league, walked all the way on crutches. "They're firing teachers, and I don't want to be without education," he said.

A Day Like This: STORM BREWING AT SANTEE

May 21, 2009 -- According to reports earlier today from Jose Lara, a teacher at Santee Education Complex, students are prepping for a walkout in the coming days. Teachers are also preparing for a hunger strike. However, in the last few hours Lara reports that Santee High School is “on lockdown” and that students from Manual Arts School and West Adams have walked out and are circling Santee in an act of solidarity.

A storm is brewing within the LAUSD. Last night, teachers, parents and students couldn’t help but express anger at a community forum hosted by the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. PLAS officials, CEO Marshal Tuck and Superintendent Angela Bass headed the meeting, which was organized in response to student protests at Santee Education Complex on Monday. Although LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines was rumored to attend, students were disappointed when he was a n0-show. They entered the auditorium chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, budget cuts have got to go” and waving hand-made signs, before retreating to the back of the room to await the Superintendent’s appearance. The media, too, had got wind of the potential guest appearance and were out in abundance. However, it soon became apparent that the forum was not going to be as dramatic as those in attendance anticipated. After briefly interviewing a couple of parents and a student, the TV crews promptly left.

Activist Tells Parents: "Your Children are getting a poor education."

Tuck handed out “update” sheets on the budget crisis within the LAUSD, outlining the deficit - which, he said, has increased from $600 million to almost $1 billion following the defeat of Propositions 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E in the local elections on Tuesday. He also emphasized that the LAUSD had, to date, retracted notices for 2000 permanent teachers. At Santee, this means a reduction from 55 to 22 lay-offs. “Remember, we all want the same thing.” said Tuck. “Teachers are the most important part of the learning process.” But Tuck also offered a warning: Santee should not stage any more protests that interupt student learning. Students should not walk out of school or strike. “Action can be loud and strong outside the school day,” said Tuck.

Christian, a student at Santee, said that the protests were a necessary way to bring much-needed attention to the issue. Attendees at the community forum were surprised and dismayed that “powerful” officials were not participating in the dialogue. “These cuts are mostly affecting low-income, Latino and African American schools. What is the Mayor doing?” one parent asked.

One student interrupted the meeting to say, “I just want to ask the question that is on everyone’s mind: Where is Cortines?”

Listen to the students chanting, and hear how PLAS CEO Marshal Tuck answered that question:

Liz Bowie From the Los Angeles Times

May 24, 2009 -- Reporting from Baltimore — For years, school systems across the nation dropped classes in the fine arts to concentrate on getting students to pass tests in reading and mathematics.

Now, a growing body of brain research suggests that teaching the arts may be good for students across all disciplines.

Scientists are looking at, for instance, whether students at an arts high school who study music or drawing have brains that allow them to focus more intensely or do better in the classroom.

Brain research in the last several years has uncovered startling ideas about how students learn. First came proof, some years ago, that our brains do not lose brain cells as we get older, but are always capable of growing.

Now neuroscientists are investigating how training students in the arts may change the structure of their brains and the way they think. Does putting a violin in the hands of an elementary school student help the child do math better? Will learning to dance or paint improve a student's spatial ability or ability to learn to read?

Research in those areas, Harvard University psychologist Jerome Kagan said, is "as deserving of a clinical trial as a drug for cancer that has not yet been shown to be effective."

There aren't many conclusions yet that can be translated into the classroom, but an interdisciplinary field is emerging between education and neuroscience.

Much of the research into the arts has centered on music and the brain. One researcher studying students who go to an arts high school found a correlation between those who were trained in music and their ability to do geometry.

A four-year study, conducted by Ellen Winner of Boston College and Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard, is looking at the effects of playing the piano or the violin on students in elementary school.

Winner said she was skeptical of claims that schools offering fine arts had seen an increase in test scores and a generally better school climate. She said she had examined those assertions and found that they couldn't be backed up by research.

The study Winner is working on has shown that children who receive a small amount of musical training -- as little as half an hour of lessons a week and 10 minutes of practice a day -- do have structural changes in their brains that can be measured. And those students, Winner said, were better at tests that required them to use their fingers with dexterity.

"It is the first study to demonstrate brain plasticity in young children related to music playing," Schlaug said.

About 15 months after the study began, students who played the instrument were not better at math or reading, although the researchers are questioning whether they have assessments that are sensitive enough to measure the changes.

The study will continue for several more years.

Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins University doctor, studied jazz musicians by using imaging technology to take pictures of their brains as they improvised. He found that when they allowed their creativity to flow, their brains shut down areas that regulated inhibition and self-control.

So are the most creative people able to shut down those areas of the brain?

Most of the new research is focusing on the networks of the brain that are involved in specific tasks, said Michael Posner, a researcher at the University of Oregon.

Posner has studied the effects of music on attention. What he found was that in those students who showed motivation and creativity, training in the arts helped develop attention and intelligence.

The next focus in this area, he said, is on proving the connection that most scientists believe exists between the study of music and math ability.

Brain imaging is now so advanced that scientists can see the difference in the brain networks of those who study a string instrument and those who study the piano intensely.

The brain research, while moving quickly by some measures, is still painfully slow for educators who would like answers today.

Mariale Hardiman, a former principal, was once one of those educators who focused attention on reading and math scores. But she saw what integrating the arts into classrooms could do for students, and researched the subject.

She is now the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Neuro-Education Initiative, a center designed to bridge that gap between science and education.

She said the research that is just starting could answer myriad questions, but there are two she'd like to see approached: Do children who learn academic content through the arts tend to hold on to that knowledge longer? And are schools squeezing creativity out of children by controlling so much of their school day?

Even without research, Kagan said, an arts education can give self-confidence to many children who aren't good at academics.

"The argument for an arts education is based not on sentimentality but on pragmatism," he said. "If an arts program only helped the 7 million children in the bottom quartile, the dropout rate would drop."